To make the most effective use of a portal and content management platform, personalization is a critical component of delivering the most value to end users. Regardless of what type of constituents you may be serving, content relevance is key to supporting business goals like self-service, communication within a geographically distributed organization, lead generation and customer loyalty effectively. This especially holds true when serving external parties, as they generally have a lower threshold for...

Looking at web technology it is easy to feel that great business value and user productivity can be gained from creating deep, complex integrations presented through elegant user interfaces. This could be the truth, but it is often far from it.
As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is the ultimate business value that an application is delivering. The most value can be gained from even the most mundane technical solution.
How does one define a great technical...

I marvel at the complexity of various finely made time pieces. I cringe at the complexity of various projects. A timepiece is generally valued by the number of “complications” or moving parts that it has. Conversely, a project is punished by the number that it has. Unfortunately the possible surface area for project issues grows exponentially as the number of tasks within a project increases.
Working in technology consulting all of my professional life it might seem that it would be to my...

* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch Community December 2007 and Portalsmag.com
Organizations are beginning to recognize the value of deploying consumer Web tools to obtain basic benefits like internal knowledge sharing. This being said, they often overlook deeper benefits that the elements, and, more importantly, their methodologies of collaborative contribution can provide. Due to their ease of use, organizations can leverage these tools to allow for natural participation within their...

Enterprise software vendors now include Web 2.0-influenced product suites with blogging, wiki, and mashup functionality. Some vendors attempt to provide programmatic development tools to incorporate these new features, while others have created end user-centric authoring environments.
In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management solutions to quickly be constructed and the barrier to effective knowledge work to drop within an...

Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn’t it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from a business standpoint does not have to be a guessing game.
Over a series of various online community and corporate intranet deployments, heuristics have...

Passionate about both business and technology, John focuses on maximizing information technology's ability to streamline and optimize business.

This blog has been created to bridge the chasm between technologists and business people - to help everyone get the most from their efforts.